Lot 66
  • 66

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Estimate
6,000,000 - 8,000,000 USD
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Description

  • Jean-Michel Basquiat
  • Untitled
  • signed and dated 87 on the reverse
  • acrylic and oilstick on canvas
  • 74 x 94 in. 187.9 x 238.7 cm.

Provenance

Private Collection, New York
Private Collection, Mexico
Ramis Barquet Gallery, New York
Faggionato Fine Arts, London
Mugrabi Collection, New York 
Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris 
Sotheby's, London, June 21, 2007, Lot 53
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Exhibited

New York, Vrej Baghoomian Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, October - November 1989, cat. no. 34, p. 87, illustrated in color
Vienna, Kunsthaus Wien, Jean-Michel Basquiat, February - March 1999, p. 98, illustrated in color 
Venice, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Basquiat à Venezia, June - October 1999, pp. 108-109, illustrated in color 
Künzelsau, Museum Würth, Jean-Michel Basquiat, September 2001 - January 2002, p. 91, illustrated in color 
Lugano, Museo d'Arte Moderna, Jean-Michel Basquiat, March - June 2005, p. 101, illustrated in color
Milan, Fondazione La Triennale di Milano, The Jean-Michel Basquiat Show, September 2006 - January 2007, cat. no. 160, p. 297, illustrated in color
New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, Totally Rad: New York in the '80s, July - September 2008 
Bonn, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Ménage à Trois. Warhol, Basquiat, Clemente, February - May 2012, p. 205, illustrated in color 


Literature

Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1st ed., Vol. II, Paris, 1996, cat. no. 2, p. 110, illustrated in color
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 2nd ed., Vol. II, Paris, 1996, cat. no. 2, p. 152, illustrated in color
Tony Shafrazi, Jeffrey Deitch, Richard D. Marshall, et al., Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, 1999, p. 276, illustrated in color
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 3rd ed., Vol. I, Paris, 2000, pp. 340-341, illustrated in color
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 3rd ed., Vol. II, Paris, 2000, cat. no. 2, p. 258, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., New York, Brooklyn Museum (and travelling), Basquiat, 2005, fig. 10, p. 173, illustrated in color

Condition

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at (212) 606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is unframed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Catalogue Note

Widely exhibited both across Europe and in New York since shortly after its execution, Untitled presents a magnificently bold and unapologetically monumental testimony to one of the most important autobiographical narratives of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life and career. Furthermore, its assertive portrayal of the intensely vivid red automobile and the attendant implications of achieved status and empowered independence, acts as a portrait of one of the key signifiers of the American Dream in the Twentieth Century. The silhouetted protagonist sitting in the driver's seat, an identifiable mystery who is simultaneously no one and everyone, acts as an elusive totem that invites reflection on the nature of identity, one of the most central and enduring themes of Basquiat’s art.


In May 1968 when he was a seven-year-old boy growing up in Flatbush in Brooklyn, Basquiat was hit by a car while playing ball in the street. Severely injured, he was rushed to hospital and underwent surgery for a broken arm, severe internal injuries and the removal of his spleen. To occupy him during a long period of recuperation in hospital, his mother Matilde gave him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, and in those pages the young boy became captivated by the elaborate drawings and diagrams of the human body’s internal architecture. Indeed, the anatomical and skeletal imagery that fascinated the young boy is a widely noted influence on Basquiat’s later painted works and drawings, replete as they are with fragmented or diagrammatic representations of the body and textual references to an indexical understanding of its parts. Thus, the events surrounding the artist’s childhood trauma become deeply connected with the nascent stages of his artistic inspiration as well as to some of the most important visual elements to later emerge in his paintings.

Basquiat eventually made a full recovery, but the entire near-fatal brush with death had a profound psychological effect and its memory came to occupy a central position in his art for the rest of his life. The car, America’s heroic icon of independent freedom, had become for Basquiat a symbol of death. Having been rooted in epic tales of immigration, American history evolved over two centuries through narratives of migration and ceaseless movement. Whether by horse, stagecoach, steam train or the automobile, this vast continental expanse was traversed by countless generations in the quest for opportunity and betterment. In the Twentieth Century there came to be no more potent symbol of the freedom and independence that are such monolithic cornerstones of the American Dream than the car. From John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road; Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night to Nicolas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause; Chuck Berry’s Get Your Kicks on Route 66 to the Beach Boys Little Deuce Coupe and Prince’s Little Red Corvette; America’s love affair with the automobile became profoundly endemic to its cultural identity. At the same time, from the mid Twentieth Century onwards, the occurrence of the fatal car crash, whether on the highway, in the city or in the suburbs, became a quotidian reality for everyday American citizens and millions were scarred by this omnipresent tragedy. Looming like an ever-present, seemingly indiscriminate scythe over Middle America’s golden age of prosperity and everything it stood for, the car crash had quietly become the primal, devastating threat to an entire way of life. While Andy Warhol had famously mined the profoundly complex thematic potential of the car crash in his seminal Death and Disasters paintings of the early 1960s, Basquiat’s personal experience of being run down by a car ensured that this motif remained fundamental to the now-legendary pictorial lexicon of his revered canon, as perfectly encapsulated by Untitled


Also chief among Basquiat’s influences and clearly referenced in the present work were the Abstract Expressionists, whose illustrious spell is discernible in the thick swathes of yellow, red and green vigorously applied across the black expanse of Untitled. Basquiat built up the surface in multiple layers of pigment, evident in the variegated colors and highly textural surface. Possessing a sophisticated knowledge of art history, Basquiat infused his painting with a defined instinctual understanding of the language of abstraction. Forceful painterly strokes are deployed with an assured command. The artist’s brute force of application, and corresponding layering of paint and line confers a remarkably paroxysmal yet deliberate compositional clarity. There is no spatial recession or perspectival logic to the composition. Rather, imbued with the frantic exertion and the random aesthetic of Jackson Pollock; the exuberant colorism of Willem de Kooning; dramatic painterly gesture of Franz Kline; combined with the integration of line on blackboard-like surfaces of Cy Twombly, Basquiat’s grasp and deployment of twentieth-century American art history reverberates throughout the painting.